You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: A Real World Challenge for STEEMIT
It's all about the ability of customers to pay - that big American investment bank (if there is one with $45bn to invest) wouldn't be able to recover its investment through revenues...from those customers which can't pay....
Who will be the customers?
The primary customers would be electricity utilities in the region. Most of them are technically it really bankrupt and wouldn't give the lenders any comfort they'd be able to pay for the electricity they would buy over the years.
At one point there was an initiative called Westcor for five utilities (from DRC, Angola, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa if memory serves, which it might not) to build DC transmission lines through a Western Corridor (hence the name) to bring Inga electrons to those utilities. It didn't succeed for reasons I won't go into here, but in part because the proponents didn't follow the basics of infrastructure project finance. A real pity - in many ways it was a good idea.
could be a case of Dutch Disease too.
And one of the biggest challenges, which cryptocurrency could be instrumental in addressing, is that the customers of those customers (i.e. people buying electricity from their electricity company) aren't considered "creditworthy" under the current conventional financial system. Until the actual customers can be considered able and willing to pay for the electricity they consume, new projects will continue to be difficult to finance under traditional infrastructure project finance mechanisms, and utilities will be difficult to finance under corporate finance as the metrics for repayment to the lenders just won't be there. There are so many ways crypto could address this combination of challenges, in part by changing the payment ecosystem that electricity consumers live in.
Makes sense.